Tag Archives: US Election 2016

This is what it must feel like to be on Death Row, to be waiting for the moment when the iron door clangs open for the last time and four burly guards escort you arm-in-arm to the room where your life will be extinguished. That same sense of dread hangs over the presidential election of 2016.

The growing sense of desperation in America today is palpable and it goes far beyond this one, isolated election cycle. The steady erosion of confidence in the nation’s main institutions is evident in Congress’s public approval ratings which seem to be stuck in single-digit territory. The public probably feels equal contempt for the Loretta Lynch Justice Department which is loaded with Clinton toadies that have done their best to quash any investigation into the illicit pay-to-play machinations at the Clinton Foundation. And, let’s not forget the media which has lost whatever shred of credibility it managed to salvage after its myriad of war-promoting lies about WMD, mobile weapons labs, aluminum tubes and Assad’s imaginary chemical weapons attacks, attacks that were invented from whole cloth at one of Washington’s many neocon think tanks where these fake ideas are typically hatched. The Forth Estate’s latest gambit is an idiotic attempt to prove that Vladimir Putin is trying to hack our thoroughly-corrupted Third World voting system to achieve some nebulous political gain. What a joke.

No, Hillary, Putin is not gaming the system like you did in the primaries with Bernie Sanders, nor did he put a gun to your head and force you to delete the 33,000 missing emails from your private server. That was your handiwork Ms. Clinton, although you have a done a masterful job in deflecting attention from yourself and passing the buck for your own sleazy, criminal activities onto Moscow.

[with links added]

Hillary stole the nomination, as Whitney reminds us, but what of Trump. The rise of Trump is more alarming again:

To large extent, Trump owes his shocking rise to the top of the GOP ticket to the fact that he shoots from the hip and that the media hates him. What was once a liability, has become an asset as trust for the despised media has plunged to depths never seen before.

But that doesn’t explain what’s really driving this election and why are the American people so overcome by desperation?

It’s all about economic insecurity. It’s all about the fact that standards of living are slipping, that an entire generation is bogged down with student debt, that all the good-paying jobs have been shipped to other countries, that family incomes are shriveling, that a good portion of the population feel threatened by immigration, that health care costs have skyrocketed, that retirement plans have been postponed, and that the great bulk of the nation’s wealth has been transferred to the 1 percent plutocrats and Wall Street landsharks who dictate policy through their Congressional lackeys and their allies at the Federal Reserve. That’s what the election is really all about.

People are waking up to the fact that the American dream is dead, that the US is no longer the land of opportunity, and that the lives of their children are going to be worse than their own, far worse. This is why everyone is so upset, so frustrated, so hopeless. They are looking for a political ally who will address their needs, and instead they get bromides on transgender bathrooms or “glass ceilings” or any of the other soothing slogans the Democrats use to pacify the masses and to keep them in the flock. Only now it’s not working as well. Now a sizable portion of the blue collar vote has shifted into Trump’s camp mainly because they see through the phony Democrat rhetoric and all the job-eviscerating free trade deals they’ve pushed for years. Trump has skillfully tapped into the collective psyche of millions of working people who feel the Democratic Party tossed them under the track-hoe 30 years ago and never looked back. And, he’s right, too.

Whitney then continues with a quote from Zerohedge that quashes any lingering doubts about whether or not billionare-man-of-the-people Trump might be Wall Street connected too:

But there was another big move that Trump made that escaped the notice of the media and which really underscores his willingness to “play by to the rules.” Here’s the story from Zero Hedge:

Six months ago, Steven Mnuchin became finance chair for the Trump campaign. Having successfully helped to raise 10s of millions of dollars for the campaign, the former Goldman Sachs partner and Soros Fund management employee is now positioned for something much larger as Donald Trump reportedly told his aides today that he wants Mnuchin to serve as his Treasury Secretary.*

[original highlight and links restored]

Whitney continues:

Another head of Treasury from G-Sax?

That figures.

Trump is great with the rabble-rousing “take back your country” tirades and all the gibberish about the “rigged” system. But he also knows how to cave in when it suits his interests. He knows he’s not going to be president without Wall Street’s nod, so he’s enlisted a trusted insider to take care of business at Treasury. It’s a signal to the bigwigs that they don’t have to worry about the Donald going off the reservation. (wink, wink) So much for Trump’s independence, eh?

Whittled down to a choice between Hillary and the Donald, it has long since been a choice between lesser evils – Alien vs Predator (I leave you to decide which is which). Here’s more on Clinton:

And what can we say about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t been said a million times before?

Clinton, who still holds a slim lead in most of the polls, is clearly the establishment candidate in a year when hatred for the corrupt Washington oligarchy, has reached levels not seen in the last hundred years. The fact that Hillary can run for the nation’s highest office while being investigated by the FBI, while being savaged by the daily releases of new, incriminating emails (from WikiLeaks), and while promoting a hawkish, neocon-driven foreign policy that portends a direct military confrontation with Russia, speaks to the fact that traditional liberal Democrats are either still hoodwinked by the Democratic Party’s manipulation of identity politics or simply terrified of the alternative, Donald Trump.

And that’s why everyone is so utterly dejected and depressed about the election, because instead of voting for a candidate they really want or admire, most people are simply voting for the candidate that either disgusts or scares the hell out of them the least. What kind of choice is that?

With Trump we face martial law in America, with Clinton, a nuclear war with Russia – not my words but the forecast of another disheartened American. As Mike Whitney concludes:

In less than 48 hours, the most agonizingly-wretched campaign of all times will be over, the ballots will be counted, and the new president will be named. The only thing that is certain is that, whoever wins, we lose.

Ironically, Trump has often criticized Clinton (and his former competitor Ted Cruz) for their links to the big banks:

“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate.

But as we noted previously, he had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him. […]

But for Trump, a self-professed “anti-establishment” candidate, who has repeatedly stated he is not “for sale to special interest groups”, his sudden call for the seemingly most “Wall Street” of Wall-Streeters to become Treasury Secretary may come as a big surprise to some and will leave many of his supporters demanding an explanation.

[highlights as in original]

*

Additional:

On Wednesday 9th, John Pilger gave an extended post-election interview with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground. The full show is embedded below alongside my own transcription of selected passages:

I think the only people surprised [by Trump’s victory] are those who enabled it to happen. I’m speaking about mainly, what I would call in the United States, a liberal class. To a certain degree in this country [i.e., Britain] a liberal class. They told us that only the status quo – only a corrupt, warmongering status quo – would be acceptable to the majority… They’ve created Trump in the same way they created Blair…

In the United States they corrupted a voting system within the Democratic Party that ensured that another populist, Bernie Sanders – I don’t think really he would have beaten Trump – but he was a populist. But instead, the corrupt candidate, the embodiment of the status quo, that has declared the whole world a battlefield was the “candidate of sanity”. “The candidate for women”. This grotesque campaigning for a candidate… who represented great rapacious power has been probably the most eye-opening side to this. I don’t think Trump is – you could see him coming a mile off. Or ‘a Trump’. [from 1:30 mins]

[Clinton] is clearly the embodiment of a corrupt system. She is the embodiment of a very warmongering system that has declared the world a place where it can go to war, wherever it likes. Where it can bomb agricultural communities in Yemen where half the children are malnourished. Where it can do what it likes in Syria. Do what it likes in Iraq. I think most of humanity… regards that kind of behaviour from the allegedly most powerful country in the world as abhorrent. And she has been the embodiment of that.

Now, whether Trump will be is an open question. He says he’s anti-establishment, but of course, he’ll come with his own establishment. He’s anti- their establishment; I don’t believe for a moment he’s anti- the wider establishment of the United States: indeed he’s a product of it. [from 3:50 mins]

The truth is there was no-one to vote for… there was perhaps Sanders earlier on. But he was a kind of minority populist candidate with a large following. But the system threw up those who could afford it: Trump had his own money; Clinton was backed by the Democratic Party. Clinton was backed by the arms companies – she was the only candidate that amongst her own backers included all but one of the ten leading arms manufacturers in the world. [from 5:20 mins]

They’re not journalists: they’re anti-journalists. One of the most revealing aspects of this has been the exposure of journalism. The exposure of journalism as an extension of that same corrupt established power that I’ve been speaking about. They’re not independent: they are echo chambers. They amplify and echo that which is handed down to them. And the worst, of course, the greatest echoes are the so-called enlightened, respectable, liberal press. The New York Times has become a kind of Cold War propaganda sheet with all the nonsense about Russia interfering in this campaign… The Guardian has given up. Yesterday, we had in the Guardian an article called the “Hall of Shame” by Jonathan Freedland in which he pointed the finger at a truth-teller like Julian Assange. As if he would be to blame if Hillary Clinton, this paragon of liberal virtue, was defeated. That’s grotesque. [from 7:10 mins]

The media along with The Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department and all the rest, including the Republican Party were Trump’s opponents. But they were the shouters… the BBC, CNN, as I mentioned, the Guardian, New York Times and you name it… they were all there because Hillary Clinton represented them. [from 9:10 mins]

But you know what has struck me is the silence. The silence of those with the facility, with the privilege, of being able to analyse and help us understand. To make sense of this extraordinary American year leading up to this extraordinary result. The silence, particularly of media, and particularly of the so-called liberal class, who have enabled so much of this. Their silence first of all about Iraq. Their silence about Libya. More than silence, their collusion with those dreadful events that are so described in Clinton’s emails…

You know, the emails that wikileaks published, that Assange spoke about the other day, really exemplify the very corruption. When you have a campaign manager of a candidate for the President of the United States [who] is the officially registered agent of Saudi Arabia. And that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton as Secretary of State is approving arms sales (including the biggest arms sales in history) to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. [from 16:00 mins]

Something like 40% of the world in one way or another is under American sanctions. The EU usually follow on. The EU is not an independent collection of nations; by and large it follows the United States. Sanctions impose themselves on countries all over the world destroying life… infamously, destroying life in Iraq, killing according to UNICEF 500,000 infants under the age of five between 1991 and 2003. Sanctions led by the United States and Britain. [from 22:50 mins]

We live in Britain with the imposition of an extreme ideology with this awful name neo-liberalism… They hauled a perfectly good word out of the dictionary – “austerity” – and now that’s part of the ideology. All of it unnecessary in this rich country. The imposition of power on people’s lives is the issue today and in whatever form it has taken that’s what Americans – the majority of Americans – took to the ballot box with them. [from 25:00 mins]

We have in the Northern hemisphere up against the border with Russia the greatest build up of US-led Nato forces since World War II. In Asia and the Pacific we have the greatest build up of US naval forces since World War II aimed at China. We have something like eight or nine hundred US bases around the world, on every continent: 400 of them encircling China. Many more, I think, I haven’t counted lately because they keep cropping up, encircling Russia… I’m not saying that those who are doing this want nuclear war. Even they must understand that it would mean their own destruction. But this recklessness I’ve often felt could lead to the kind of mistake or accident that begins something.

And that is all about the imposition of power that comes from within the West. That is the issue. That’s the issue that this election campaign has thrown up and that’s the issue about which so many of those [in] the educated liberal class – those with the privilege of public platforms – have kept silent about. Keeping that out of the campaign in the United States has been a liberal exercise. Keeping it out of the reporting of the campaign in this country has been the same exercise. [from 26:10 mins]

I’m going to be honest with you. I’m horrified. I’m absolutely beyond myself. I had a 12-year-old daughter sobbing at home. We failed our young people. We failed generations to come… It’s a mirror up to our face as a nation, that this is who we are and who we have been. And anyone who has denied us that truth is why we are in the place that we are in right now. And we have a president right now who has access to executive orders. He has access to nuclear codes. He is going to appoint the next Supreme Court justice, which will live for generations after his presidency. I am appalled that I am sitting right now having to figure out how to explain to young people across this country, including my own children, why we have a sexist, misogynist, racist Islamaphobe in the White House. I’m just—I haven’t slept all night. I have no idea. I’m speechless.

Amy[Goodman], honestly, like I don’t care what anyone says. If Bernie Sanders was the Democratic nominee, we would have won this election by far. Michigan, we were down 20 percent in the polls in the primaries, and Michigan gave Bernie Sanders the biggest political upset in U.S. history. […]

Yes, he did, in Michigan. Who gave him that win? It was Muslims in Dearborn. We looked at—we looked at Dearborn this time around for Hillary. I’m going to be honest with you. Hillary wasn’t helping me. I went around the country talking an anti-Trump message, because I couldn’t bring myself to support her and be as a surrogate like I was for Bernie Sanders. War hawk, warmonger—people were worrying about what she would do in Syria, looking at her foreign policy. […]

What I want to say, Amy, is that this is a time for soul searching for the Democratic Party. They left young people out in the cold. They called us naive. They called us idealistic. They left Muslims out in the cold. Any time Hillary Clinton mentioned us, she said we were eyes and ears, we were on the front lines of countering terrorism. She never talked about us in any other way but as a law enforcement tool. And I’m honestly—I’m just waking up now, even though I haven’t slept. I’m outraged, not just at the fact that Donald Trump is the president. I’m outraged at the people who are going to put blame on black people and immigrants and Latinos voted more for Trump than they did for Mitt Romney, when, in fact, the blame that I want to put here is on the Democratic Party, because they are the ones that put me in this situation. [from 4:20 mins]

It’s incredibly striking, but also very alarming, how similar the path of Brexit was to the election of Trump, because just like with the U.S. election, in the U.K. during the Brexit debate referendum, British elites, outside of this kind of circle of populist, right-wing Murdoch types, pretty much were unified across ideological and party lines. You had the Liberals and the Labour centrists and the sort of more establishment Conservatives united in opposition to Brexit. And they essentially stayed online all day on Twitter telling each other how smart they were and praising each other’s columns, saying that Brexit was this grave threat and this unique evil. And the opinion class that is considered respectable, meaning not the right-wing tabloids, essentially unified, just like the opinion-making elites in the U.S., outside of Sean Hannity and Fox News and Ann Coulter, that wing of Fox News and that right-wing circle, were unified, as well. You had leading neocon intellectuals and establishment Republicans and then the sort of establishment liberal pundits all in agreement that Trump was this grave evil, constantly praising each other and citing each other in this endless echo feedback chamber.

And so, the people who were supporting Brexit and the people who were supporting Trump weren’t really ever heard from; they were just talked about in very contemptuous tones. These were the troglodytes. These were the uneducated idiots. These were the people motivated by malice and racism and xenophobia. And so they were sort of looked at like zoo animals, like things that you dissect and condemn.

And because this opinion-making elite was so unified, it led so many people, in both cases, to believe that their victory was certain. Nobody thought, in the opinion-making elite classes, that Brexit would win, and the same is true of Trump.

And then, both before and after you had this result, what you saw is not any notion of accountability. Why are there so many people wanting to leave the EU? Why are there so many people supporting this person so far outside the norm? No accountability, no self-critique. Only a way to distract attention from their own responsibility by just spouting hatred and disgust for the people who are being insubordinate.